Lopez asks:Does Anyone Really Disagree with This?
A Bush administration HHS nominee is getting grief for his involvement with a pregnancy center that believes: "that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness."

Passing out contraception without any deeper context or conversation is degrading and disrespectful — to men and women. Tell me I'm crazy.

But the fact is one does not have to be an opponent of contraception to think that we have a contraceptive mentality in our culture that is in fact demeaning. Where we give kids condoms instead of teaching them why waiting would be of some value — for a lot more reasons than not getting pregnant.

A contraceptive mentality is demeaning to women and men. It's dehumanizing something that's essentially all about life. Dehumanizing human sexuality is depressingly perverse and at the root of a whole lot of heartache.

The Torodes take the Word literally when it comes to the meaning of marriage: Remember, for instance, this: "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it" (Genesis 1:27-28). And this: "He answered and said, 'Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate'" (Matthew 19: 4-6).

Artificial contraception, the Torodes say, puts up a barrier that doesn't belong in a Christian marriage.

The Torodes write that "Respect for the one-flesh mystery of marriage gives us serious qualms about the use of contraception. To invoke St. Paul's analogy, would Christ ever withhold any part of himself from the Church, or sterilize his love?" As they understand it, "anything less than a true one-flesh union fails to represent the completely self-giving love of Christ for the Church. This is why we believe that when a husband and wife have serious reasons to avoid pregnancy, it's better to abstain for a time than to diminish the meaning and mystery of sex."

Like the [previous] pope [wrote] extensively, the Torodes believe that contraception is not consistent with a "culture of life." [Ah-hah! - DS] But they believe that most pro-lifers haven't even thought through it. Both the Bible and Catholic thinkers, the Torodes contend, have much to teach couples about married life and, well, life — whether they're Catholic or not.

Evangelicals are known for engaging the culture. Contemporary Christian music, for example, often mimics the sound of "secular" music while adding Christian lyrics, as though the music conveys no message of its own. Problems arise when we begin engaging the culture and end up marrying it. [It's the gay marriage slippery slope! First you get man-on-dog, then you get men marrying box turtles, then you have evangelicals marrying their native culture! -DS]

Our culture tells us that sex is really about pleasure, not spousal unity and procreation. Thus, in order to stay culturally relevant, many Christians stress that it was God who designed sex to yield pleasure. From this legitimate starting point, however, some Christians end up elevating pleasure above the procreative and unitive aspects of sex. In so doing, they unconsciously buy into our culture's hedonistic pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself.

Oh, about the title of this post. I originally was going to call it "The war on sex," but changed my mind because that simply isn't accurate. It is fucking the rightwing opposes. The ecstatic, transgressive, transcendent, life-affirming, overwhelmingly selfish and also ego-obliterating ecstasy that is sex.

Selling the idea that you personally don’t deserve pleasure, you peon, is done by the church’s tacit acceptance of Natural Family Planning. NFP gives lie to the idea that the church is completely anti-contraception. NFP, after all, is a form of contraception. Proponents of NFP say they like that it’s “natural”, which implies all other forms of contraception involve hormones or changing your body in some way, which isn’t true at all of barrier methods. Where NFP is different than other forms of contraception, and why it’s the only acceptable method for the anti-choicers is that it’s the only one that demands that you sacrifice spontaneity and pleasure, because you can only have sex at appointed times. NFP is acceptable to anti-choicers because it’s anti-love and demands that lovers refrain from sexual pleasure and bonding, at least some of the time. It drives home the message that your body isn’t yours to share and enjoy as you see fit.

Which is funny because the official line of the anti-choice Catholics and now Protestants who are enamored of this anti-joy approach to sex is that their approach to sex is somehow more loving than those who use more reliable contraception. Of course, the word “love” is how they sell the philosophy that sex should be about domination, in this case male domination of women. . . .

The argument that a couple who is fucking without contraception are “giving” to each other is a straight-up argument that sex is about male domination. The man’s “gift” is to orgasm; the woman’s “gift” is to suffer one pregnancy after another. . . . The only way to convince people that treating a woman like an incubator is respect is to spread even more misogyny by arguing that women who fuck for pleasure are whores. And so the anti-choice view of “love” comes down to the idea that women are debased and that men are so elevated that women should treat getting pregnant again as a gift because they’ve been blessed by the Holy Sperm. In other words, sex is about male dominance.

The [Torodes'] book is about much more than the contraception question though. Bethany makes a beautiful argument in favor of stay-at-home motherhood, and other choices the Torodes believe are keys to successful matrimony.

"that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness" is obvious. Evidence will be at many a bar, in many a pint of Ben & Jerry's, etc. this evening.

an elevated level of endorphins which in turn lowers the level of oxytocin. Therefore, relationship failure leads to pain which leads to elevated endorphins which leads to lower oxytocin, the result of which is a lower ability to bond. Many in this increased state of emotional pain and lower oxytocin seek sex as a substitute for love, which inevitably leads to another failed relationship, and so on, the cycle continues.

So there you have it–anti-choicers are anti-sex all right, but they’re also anti-marriage, anti-child and anti-woman in real life terms, not in airy, abstract religious horseshit terms. They want sex to be a point of tension, not joy, in couples’ lives. They want children to be so numerous they can’t be cared for properly. And they want women to be resigned to a choice between being treated like whores or treated like incubators.